When you realize what’s missing in mainstream coverage of the election of two British National Party (BNP) candidates to European Parliament, you shouldn’t be able to stand all at once. Really, the omission should stun you. And if you can’t laugh aloud at it, out of shame and awkwardness at the absurdity of the thing, you might never be the same again. I won’t tell you what it is right away, though: I’m curious to see if you reach the same conclusion — and how quickly you do. In the meantime, let me lay out the story at hand, as it’s been reported throughout the mainstream British and North American media.

After Nick Griffin and Andrew Born became the first members of the BNP, which has a “restrictive membership policy” refusing entry to blacks and asians, to attain such levels of legitimate power, there was much talk of public reaction, and justifications for their election in the first place. Within hours, Griffin had egg on his face — literally — as protestors shouted “Off our streets, Nazi scum” and held up banners condemning the party as fascist. Meanwhile, broadcasters resigned themselves to giving him airtime — a perk necessitated by his new position, but entered into cautiously because of cultural reluctance to give forum to concepts like racism and xenophobia.

And there are indeed both here. While Geert Wilders, of the Dutch Freedom Party — and another member of European Parliament — claims his issue is with “Islam as an ideology, not the colour of people’s skin”, Griffin managed to change his party into something more approachable without veering from “core values” like the following, shared on BBC Radio 5 Live after his election:

“All indigenous people all over the world have certain rights and one of those is to control their own borders so their bloodline and their culture remains dominant in their country without being hostile to anybody else. It is a basic human right.”

He is, of course, also a Holocaust denier (his adolescence in the National Socialist Movement, a group honouring Hitler and responsible for cases of arson on Jewish property, he typifies as “youthful indiscretion”), though he’s cleverly sought to downplay perceptions of anti-Semitism in his party — and why not, when clearly the menace of Islam is such that a few Jews kicking about are small peas in comparison?

So the “global warming is a hoax” shtick he also forwards — condemning an exploitative liberal base for using this issue to over-tax hard-working citizens (see? people who support immigration are just all around jerks to decent white British folk!) when the real issue is clearly peak oil (read: our need to stop being dependent on foreigners for anything) — is really just the cherry on top of one enormous shit sundae.

More interesting still is how the BNP was able to gain so much traction so quickly — a multifaceted development that leaves some thankful they only received two seats in total (Ed West of The Telegraph, writing about the need for a less polemic debate about immigration, reports that some were predicting five, or even eight, handed off). On the one hand, the BNP exploited the hell out of a recent expense claims scandal in British parliament, with Griffin deftly culling the working class vote from the Labour Party after lax rules allowed such expenses as the following to be billed to a nation already struggling with the impact of global recession:

NYT — For the Tories, the worst embarrassments lay in charges for the clearing of a moat, a shipment of horse manure for a garden, the maintenance of sprawling woodlands, the installation of a miniature “duck house” in a country house pond. The more mundane needs of Laborites and Liberal Democrats were met by claims for nonexistent mortgages, dry-rot repairs at the house of a Labor M.P.’s partner, and a Liberal Democrat’s trouser press. Before he resigned over the scandal, the speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, claimed thousands of pounds for a chauffeur-driven car that drove him about his Glasgow constituency, one of Britain’s poorest.

Consequent displays of “breathtaking arrogance” didn’t help, either:

Anthony Steen, a 69-year-old Conservative, told a BBC reporter that $135,000 in claims for the upkeep of his country home were nobody’s business. “Do you know what it’s about? Jealousy,” he said. “I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s a merchant’s house of the 19th century. It’s not particularly attractive. It just does me nicely.”

So if it weren’t for the fact that the party turned to in this time of great public anger, resentment, and disillusionment, is itself one of anger, resentment, and disillusionment (to say nothing of being racially motivated in its manifestations of all three), you might even say the House of Commons had it coming.

But then again, the victories weren’t garnered solely on account of the expense claims scandal; Griffin himself said there was “an enormous correlation between high BNP votes and nearby Islamic populations.” Which leads to the other part of their winning strategy: Making the threat of immigration quantifiable, by highlighting how it directly targets the children of good, decent, white British folk.

Enter the high profile subject of Muslim “grooming” of white girls for sex, and the presentation of a calmer, more reasonable-seeming Griffin on the BNP website, where he introduces a series of three “deeply shocking” videos with such moderate caveats as “We’re not putting these up because we want to alarm people or be sensationalist, but because we want to draw attention to a really serious and growing problem in our multicultural society.”

And it’s precious, too, that in follow-up to his comment about the demographics of his voters, even Griffin explains how “the reason for [this correlation between voters and geography] is nothing to do with Islamophobia; it is issues such as the grooming of young English girls for sex by a criminal minority of the Muslim population.” A criminal minority, did you see that? And yet the BNP’s advertising campaign would prey on the country’s horrific overarching track record for sexual assault to demonize the entire British Muslim population. Clever, isn’t it?

But what’s cleverer still — if you haven’t noticed it yet — is that for all the nuanced analysis of causality, and consequence; for all the articles about whether or not Griffin will attend the Queen’s garden parties now, or how the media will handle having BNP members on their shows, or even what kind of public outcry the election of Griffin and Bron has yielded, you will find nothing — NOTHING — in mainstream media articles detailing any measure of comment, expert or personal, from the groups most affected by these elections: the British Asians, and the British Blacks, themselves.

And though we can preach until the cows come home about how offensive Griffin’s election is, and how offensive such xenophobic and racist beliefs are, until we realize that our very discourse on the subject implicitly talks around, instead of including, the very people the media claims are equal and full citizens of the British commonwealth, we are all just as guilty of perpetuating the dangerous myth of “otherness” that presently threatens the very fabric of European unity.

June 8, 2009

Two years back I happened upon the Global Media Monitoring Project, a survey conducted every five years to determine who makes the news, and who makes it into the news, on the basis of gender. The 2005 iteration of this survey received data from 76 different countries, monitoring 12,893 news stories (radio, TV, and print), including 25,671 sources, and presented by 14,273 news personnel; and the results were profound:

Women are dramatically under-represented in the news

Only 21 percent of news subjects — the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about — are female. Though there has been an increase since 1995, when 17 percent of those heard and seen in the news were women, the situation in 2005 remains abysmal. For every woman who appears in the news, there are five men.

Women’s points of view are rarely heard in the topics that dominate the news agenda.

There is not a single major news topic in which women outnumber men as newsmakers. In stories on politics and government only 14 percent of news subjects are women; and in economic and business news only 20 percent. Yet these are the topics that dominate the news agenda in all countries. Even in stories that affect women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, it is the male voice (64 percent of news subjects) that prevails. [emphasis mine]
…

As newsmakers, women are under-represented in professional categories

such as law (18 percent), business (12 percent) and politics (12 percent). In reality, women’s share of these occupations is higher. For instance, in Rwanda — which has the highest proportion of female politicians in the world (49 percent) — only 13 percent of politicians in the news are women.

As authorities and experts women barely feature in news stories.

Expert opinion in the news is overwhelmingly male. Men are 83 percent of experts, and 86 percent of spokespersons. By contrast, women appear in a personal capacity — as eye witnesses (30 percent), giving personal views (31 percent), or as representatives of popular opinion (34 percent).
…

Women are more than twice as likely as men to be portrayed as victims:

Now, I have read much in the past two years that confirms women’s issues are not solely the domain of women writers — that men can, in fact, write stories about matters that profoundly affect womankind. Jeffrey Gettleman’s “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War” was a devastating and desperately needed piece about the under-reported incidence of rape as a weapon of war. Alex Renton’s “The Rape Epidemic” provided an outsider’s account of systemic abuses in Haiti. And for all The Globe and Mail‘s sensationalizing of the case, articles like Robert Matas’ “Week 24: Pickton demonstrated how he strangled prostitutes, witness says” made sure we knew full well who Robert Pickton was, and just how many lives he destroyed.

Moreover, for all the benefits of having a woman talk to other women about sensitive cultural and personal matters, there are the practicalities of a war-torn world to consider, too: Some are simply not safe for foreign women (let alone local women) — and though all journalists can be expected to run grave risks when visiting difficult countries (as Euna Lee and Laura Ling, sentenced to 12 years hard labour in North Korea, recently discovered), those risks are markedly higher for women — both in terms of being targeted in the first place, and in the context of just what can be done to a woman, once targeted. We stand out. We’re generally smaller, with less comparative strength. We can become the personal property of our captors, married off or forced into lives of prostitution. And we can be raped into pregnancy, or else gang-raped for months until we perish. These aren’t just sickening possibilities: they’re maddening ones. And if the gentlemen’s club of inside intel wasn’t enough to make reporting on many parts of the world hard enough, these facts make it damn near impossible to have women representing women with any degree of equality in matters of extremely gendered global conflict.

But as I read yesterday’s cover story for The Toronto Star, “How did 100,000,000 women disappear?” I found myself too numb for anger, too numb for tears. 100 million women — not all lost at birth, no, though so many cultures kill off female children as often as they can; and not all lost from “accidents” inflicted by families forcing the newlyweds’ to pay their dowry debts; and not all lost from violence most heinous and inhuman; but so many lost over the course of a lifetime from basic, gendered neglect, and the prioritization of access to aid to the males instead.

Such sweeping and senseless losses, in such sweeping and senseless numbers, makes the true message of the GMMP all too clear: If our primary coverage of women is as victims, then all we will find are more victims. Many, many, many more victims.

And while there are justifications, yes, for why women do not do more to report on the suffering of fellow women worldwide, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for why we do not do more to report on the empowerment of women worldwide. It needn’t be so blatant as this; one needn’t write that a woman’s career was a win for all women — but talk, at least, of that career: follow it. Report on it. Introduce more female experts. Cover subjects that preoccupy women throughout the world. It’s not rocket science, but it requires dedication, and patience.

It’s so simple, in fact, it’s almost painful to state it: Women are victims because of how little they are valued, and how easy it is to devalue them.

Change this perception, and you change the world — too late, perhaps, for the 100 million dead and gone in the world today.

War journalism has to be the toughest media gig around. You go out, you get the facts, you tell a very complex story as best you can. And then you have to sit on it. Or the censors get to it. Or your editor just tells you to take it down a notch. Why? Because if you’re too detailed — about intentions, about army locations — you put more lives at risk. Every day finding the balance between two difficult end-goals (telling the whole story, and doing as little harm in the process as possible) carries much greater risks than just about any other kind of news.

It’s not as though plain old local investigative reporting doesn’t come with its own risks: damaging an individual or a community’s reputation can have very dire consequences in and of itself. But in a war, on the ground, those consequences are much more immediate, and lie almost invariably in further casualties.

For all these stories, whether they be about suicide, rape, vandalism, brutality and torture, corpse mutilation, unnecessary civilian casualties, or “friendly fire” incidents, anything that casts our own soldiers, or their allies, in a poor light during war time is immediately deemed a danger to their safety, either through internal morale issues or the provocation of heightened aggression from enemy combatants. And often this status leads to more delicacy, more omission, and more neglect in the realm of story updates.

This is a problem.

It’s a problem when incidents keep happening that, with or without the help of the media sphere, make it to the public consciousness — creating in their wake a mythology that, in its vagueness, ends up implicating the good right along with the bad. And after all the horrific military abuses that emerged during and after Bush’s presidency, I highly doubt further censorship, in the aim of keeping a damper on such rumours, would either be effective or without backlash. So what options are we left with?

The story of Sgt Russell had a news cycle of a scant two days; I’ve given it over a week, and no follow-up exists. To be fair, though, the media’s had its hands full in the last couple days especially, with the case of Steven D. Green, the “ex-soldier” who instigated the gang rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl, alongside the murders of her father, her mother, and her younger sister, while a private for Bravo Company, First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. This is too sick a case to refer to without more vile details, because the news broke just yesterday that Green is getting life in prison for his role in this heinous attack; he, along with four other soldiers implicated in this incident, will be up for parole in ten years:

New York Times — The March 2006 murders in Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, were so bloody that American and Iraqi authorities first thought they were the work of insurgents. The American soldiers were implicated after at least one acknowledged to fellow soldiers a role in the crimes.

At the time, the Iraq insurgency was near its violent apex, and American forces were suffering heavy casualties. Private Green’s unit, Bravo Company, First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, was sent to a particularly violent area that soldiers called the Triangle of Death soon after arriving in Iraq in the fall of 2005.

The battalion quickly suffered casualties, including a sergeant close to Private Green. In December, Private Green, along with other members of his platoon, told an Army stress counselor that he wanted to take revenge on Iraqis, including civilians. The counselor labeled the unit “mission incapable” because of poor morale, high combat stress and anger over the deaths, and said it needed both stronger supervision and rest. It got neither, testimony at Mr. Green’s trial showed.

On March 11, 2006, after drinking Iraqi whiskey, Private Green and other soldiers manning a checkpoint decided to rape an Iraqi girl who lived nearby, according to testimony. Wearing civilian clothing, the soldiers broke into a house and raped Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Soldiers in the group testified that Private Green killed the girl’s parents and a younger sister before raping and then shooting the girl in the head with the family’s own AK-47, which it had kept for self defense.”

Two things came to mind when I read this story: First, and most prominently, was the blatant labelling of Green as an “ex-soldier” in the headline: “Ex-Soldier Gets Life Sentence for Iraq Murders.” Well, yes, clearly the army would dishonourably discharge him after such an incident. I could see that getting a sentence or two inside the actual article. But as the primary fact in a headline about the heinous crime, its consequences, and the systemic mental health issues it brings yet again to the surface? Not on your life: Green was a soldier when he committed those acts — a soldier whose entire unit was deemed unfit for duty, and yet was left by its superiors without adequate resources for stress and grief management. The moment we veer from these facts, even for a second, we start shifting our attention from the continual immediacy of mental health issues on the ground in Iraq, and permit the build-up to more — more killings, more rapes, more suicides.

… Which leads me to the second thought this article prompted — a throwback to something I’d read last week in relation to Sgt Russell. “At a Senate hearing Tuesday,” ABC News reported, “Army Secretary Pete Geren and chief of staff Gen. George Casey diverged from a discussion of the Army’s budget to weigh in on what is being done for soldiers like Russell. … Casey said it isn’t true most soldiers suffer from post traumatic stress disorder following combat, instead making the point that ‘the vast majority of people that go to combat have a growth experience because they are exposed to something very, very difficult and they succeed.'”

Honestly, I don’t know quite how to take this argument: I’m sure there are plenty of people who cope perfectly with the taking of enemy lives, the knowledge of civilian casualties, children or otherwise, an awareness of the brutality wrought by others in their ranks, and exposure to the deaths or crippling injuries of their comrades. I’m just not entirely sure I’d be comfortable around them.

The fact is, war is not meant to be pretty, and it cannot be managed with the board-room efficiency of a business. Nor should it be: No amount of spin and rhetoric should ever take away from the importance of protecting human life, and the gravity of its loss in a time of war. Sadly, it looks very much as though each generation needs to live through a time of conflict before that lesson truly hits home.

And yet, surely we can do better. Surely there is a way, with all of the channels available to us today, to be better in our reporting. Better by our fellow civilians, who are represented to the world by the actions of our troops, and our public condemnation (or lack thereof) of any wrongdoing on the field. Better to the civilians whose lives we claim we’re trying to protect from insurgency and tyranny in the war zones we’re fighting in, by holding military abuses on their soil to higher account. And better still to the soldiers themselves, who for better or worse place themselves in the line of fire — external and internal, in the course of duty — in search of a better peace than the one we already know.

I think the road to this goal lies with a stronger division between war journalism and reporting on the military. But I also think this argument is one for another day — Monday, to be specific.

Today I just want to end off reflecting on the five lives ended by Sgt Russell, and the four, equally innocent, lives cut short by Ex-Private Green. How much future bloodshed could we ward off, I wonder, if we truly gave ourselves over to the solemn remembrance of all that’s come before?